London: A Multi-Century
Struggle for Sustainable
Development in an Urban
Environment
Faculty Research Working Paper Series
William C. Clark
Harvard Kennedy School
August 2015
RWP15-047
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“London: A multi-century struggle for
sustainable development in an urban environment”
William C. Clark *†
Forthcoming in modified form in Pamela Matson, William C. Clark and Krister Andersson,
Pursuing Sustainability: A Guide to the Science and Practice. Princeton Univ. Press 2016.
Abstract
In this paper I sketch key episodes in the two thousand year history of interactions
between society and environment that have shaped the City of London and its hinterlands.
My purpose in writing it has been to provide an empirical puzzle for use in teaching and
theorizing about the long term coevolution of social-environmental systems and the
potential role of policy interventions in guiding that coevolution toward sustainability. I
undertook it because while a lively body of theory has begun to emerge seeking to explain
such coevolution, rich descriptive characterizations of how specific social-environmental
systems have in fact changed over the long time periods (multi-decade to multi-century)
relevant to sustainable development remain relatively rare. One result is that the field of
sustainability science lacks a sufficient number of the rich empirical puzzles that any field
of science needs to challenge its theorizing, modeling and predictions. This paper reflects
the beginning of an effort to provide one such characterization on a topic central to
sustainability: the long term development of cities and their hinterlands.
*
William C. Clark ([email protected]) is Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science, Public Policy
and Human Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and serves as the co-director of the
Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University. The author thanks Graham Clark for research assistance.
The text has benefited from suggestions and comments by Krister Andersson, Anna Clark, Graham Clark, Adam
Clark, Pamela Matson, Kira Matus and Nora O’Neil. Support from Italy’s Ministry for Environment, Land and Sea is
gratefully acknowledged.
†
© 2015 by William C. Clark. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be
quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.
1
“London: A multi-century struggle for
sustainable development in an urban environment”
Contents
Preface ....................................................................................................................................................................... 1
London: The struggle for sustainable development in an urban environment ............................ 3
Aspiring to Sustainability: London today ............................................................................................... 3
A Place by the Sea: London’s founding to the Norman Conquest .................................................. 4
Forest, Food and Fuel to the Plague of 1348: London in the Middle Ages ................................. 5
Muddling through to the Great Fire of 1666: London of the Tudors & Stuarts ....................... 8
A Waste of Life: London’s battle with disease in the 18th Century .............................................. 9
Water, Waste & Sewers up to the Great Stink of 1858: Victorian London .............................. 12
Persistent Air Pollution & the Great Smog: London’s 20th Century ........................................ 16
Sustainable development questions arising from the London case ............................................... 18
References Cited ................................................................................................................................................. 19
Endnotes ................................................................................................................................................................ 22
Preface
I wrote this paper as a case history for use in teaching about, and stimulating research on,
the long term coevolution of social and environmental systems and the potential of policy
interventions to guide that coevolution toward sustainability. In writing the case I found
that I needed to draw on scholarship from history, demography, epidemiology and urban
studies—all fields in which I have little or no formal training. Furthermore, I needed to
integrate that scholarship into a coherent account of social-environmental interactions in
the City of London—an extraordinarily complex place with which I have limited direct
experience. The result is an incomplete work in progress. I would therefore be most
grateful for corrections, suggestions of additional sources or perspectives, and more
generally help for in producing a more accurate and useful case study. As background to
this plea for help, a few words are perhaps in order on the niche that I am hoping that this
study will ultimately help to fill.
The study of complex social-environmental (also called human-ecological) systems and the
mutual impacts of their components on one another has a long heritage but has really taken
off over the last couple of decades. It is now generally accepted, however, that the
1
environment shapes society, that society in term shapes the environment and that
interactions between the two systems must be often studied to make sense of either. This
is especially true when one is trying to explain their dynamics over periods of decades to
centuries. The practical importance of understanding such long term dynamics of socialenvironmental systems has been heightened by practical concerns about their sustainable
development, what threatens it and what can be done to enhance it.
Over the last decade a lively body of theory has begun to emerge seeking to explain the
dynamics of such complex adaptive social-environmental systems and the conditions for
their sustainable development. 1 Surprisingly, however, rich descriptive characterizations
of how specific social-environmental systems have in fact changed over the long time
periods (multi-decade to multi-century) relevant to sustainable development remain
relatively rare. 2 One result is that the field of sustainability science lacks a sufficient
number of the rich empirical puzzles that any field of science needs to challenge its
theorizing, modeling and predictions. It’s as though we were stuck in the bad old days of
trying to build theory about long term climate change without access to the Vostok ice
cores, or about causes of the demographic transition without comparative national data on
population sizes across space and time.
The majority of the long term characterizations of social-environmental dynamics of which
I am aware tend to cover only particular episodes out of longer histories of interaction, and
to focus disproportionately on relatively spectacular instances of apparent collapse or
triumph rather than the more mundane but perhaps more common cases that involve
elements of both. We can learn much from trying to understand such episodes. But they
do not challenge us with the full variety of dynamics exhibited by social-environmental
systems over the long run and thus are not sufficient as a challenge to or check on our
theorizing about sustainable development. For that, we need more longer term
characterizations of the full range of dynamics exhibited by complex, adaptive socialenvironmental systems. This paper reflects the beginning of an effort to provide one such
characterization on a topic central to sustainability: the long term development of cities
and their hinterlands.
William C. Clark
Professor of International Science, Policy and Human Development
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
July 2015
2
London: The struggle for sustainable development in an urban
environment
Cities constitute increasingly important sites for understanding and managing the
coevolution of society and environment. More than half of the world’s people already live
in cities, up from 14% in 1900 and only 3% in 1800. 3 This urbanization trend seems
inexorable: within the lifetimes of today’s young adults, more than 2/3 of the world’s
people are likely to be urbanites. 4
Whether continuing urbanization will promote or imperil sustainable development has
long been a subject of debate. On the one hand, as noted by the UN Population Fund:
Cities offer a more favorable setting for the resolution of social and
environmental problems than rural areas. Cities generate jobs and income.
With good governance, they can deliver education, health care and other
services more efficiently than less densely settled areas simply because of their
advantages of scale and proximity. Cities also present opportunities for social
mobilization and women’s empowerment. And the density of urban life can
relieve pressure on natural habitats and areas of biodiversity. 5
On the other, cities throughout history have been the settings for human squalor and
indignity of unimaginable proportions. And urbanization has managed to degrade beyond
livability both the immediate environments of cities and the environments of the
hinterlands from which cities have drawn their resources and to which they have exported
their wastes.
Most cities have experienced both of these faces of urbanization, whether through their
histories, across their contemporary neighborhoods or both. It is therefore hard to
disagree with the UN Secretary General’s conclusion that “Our struggle for global
sustainability will be won or lost in cities” of the world. 6 For a look at that struggle, I
examine in this paper the coevolution of society and environment in one of the world’s
great cities: London, England.
Aspiring to Sustainability: London today
London today is widely recognized as a leading “World City.” It regularly scores at or near
the top of surveys about sustainability and quality of life in urban areas, racking up
especially high scores for its international clout, its technological savvy and its livability;
doing well on economy, governance and many dimensions of environment, but still
struggling with air pollution, housing and social cohesion. 7 The City is proud of its position,
relatively self-critical of its shortcomings and committed to doing better. A recent official
plan for Greater London—an evolving document launched in the early years of the 21st
Century—centers on a
3
Vision for the sustainable development of London… over the years to 2031 and
beyond [in which] London should: excel among global cities—expanding
opportunities for all its people and enterprises, achieving the highest
environmental standards and quality of life and leading the world in its
approach to tackling the urban challenges of the 21st century, particularly that
of climate change. 8
That London can now aspire to such an ambitious vision for its future is remarkable—and
instructive—when one considers the city’s history. This consists of nearly two thousand
years of apparently unsustainable developments, some very like those being experienced in
today’s most rapidly growing “new” cities. Over this period, a combination of ignorance
and the pursuit of short term personal gains by Londoners repeatedly imposed long term,
large scale costs of social and environmental degradation that eventually became
untenable. But people responded with a mix of political activism, scientific discoveries,
technological inventions, social adjustments and new forms of governance that—together
with events occurring in the wider world beyond London—opened the way for the next
round of development initiatives. These invariably led to their own surprises and
readjustments of which the current plan for Greater London is but the latest installment.
How should we view the resulting whip-lash trajectory of London’s historical development
from the perspective of “sustainability?” What are the most important unanswered
research puzzles posed by that trajectory? What should we learn from London’s history
that can help to guide the ongoing global process of urbanization on a path toward
sustainable development? Posing such questions, and inviting exploration of potential
answers to them, is the purpose of this paper.
A Place by the Sea: London’s founding to the Norman Conquest
The Romans established the fortifications reflected in contemporary London’s “square
mile” around AD 50. The site they chose was, following the doctrines of Caesar’s engineer
Vetruvius, on a gentle slope well positioned for the sun to clear away mists and vapors
from the lower grounds lying to the south. 9 Like most places that eventually become major
cities, London was also founded on a river—a source of water, food, power and transport.
Its siting on the Thames River was special, however, placing London at the limits of where
ocean tides affected the river’s height and could thus also be used to help move goods up
river from the open sea (about 80km to the west) as well as seaward with normal river
flow. This “two-directional” river setting helped to establish London as a major trading
center. But it also meant that the city, along with much of its downstream hinterland, was
vulnerable to flooding when strong North Sea storm surges coincided with exceptionally
high tides. Efforts to build embankments and other protective works began in the earliest
Roman times, continued through the medieval period, and included construction of the
massive Thames Barrier gates in response to the flooding of the city in 1953. Efforts to
retain the benefits of its place by the sea, while reducing the related vulnerabilities, are
playing a central role in the city’s plans for dealing with climate change in the 21st Century.
4
For its first thousand years of existence, London was repeatedly sacked, burned, occupied
and abandoned. By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, however, it had become a
substantial city with enduring structures (e.g., the Tower of London), its own governing
charter, and a population of 10,000 or more. The needs of that population were, at first,
readily provided by the natural environment of the city and its immediate hinterlands.
Water was abundant and clean. The city was surrounded by rich marshlands and
agricultural clearings that provided not only food but also a repository for human waste
that was collected in the city and sold to the farmers as fertilizer. Beyond these intensively
managed lands were extensive forests that furnished food, fuel and timber for construction.
Reflecting the central importance of these forest lands to social life, an elaborate though not
particularly equitable system of traditions, rights and laws emerged to govern who had
access to them for what sorts of uses. 10
Forest, Food and Fuel to the Plague of 1348: London in the Middle Ages 11
The early medieval period was a time of rapid population growth in England as a whole, as
well as in London which had become the country’s principal city. From 1100 to 1300, the
population quadrupled, reaching a peak of perhaps 80,000 inhabitants (see Figure 1). The
challenges of providing for the city’s increasing material and energy needs, and of
disposing of the resulting wastes, increased accordingly.
Figure 1. London’s population over the last millennium (thousands of people, log scale) 12
10000
1000
100
10
1
1000
1100
1200
1300
1400
1500
1600
1700
1800
1900
2000
Some of the tightest early constraints on London’s development involved water, both
bringing it into the city and disposing of excess rainfall. To deal with the supply problem,
numerous conduits were constructed to tap nearby ponds and lakes, as well as tributaries
to the Thames, and to bring them all into the city center. Drainage was accomplished
through unorganized runoff into the Thames and its tributaries, supplemented by the
construction of additional “sewers” (modeled on those of Roman times) to capture runoff
5
and convey it to the river. Industrial wastes, principally from breweries, tanneries, and the
like, were dumped directly into the watercourses. Household waste, principally human
excrement, was collected and disposed of in local cesspits (also called “cesspools” or
“necessary chambers”) that—as in earlier times—were periodically emptied and the
contents (fittingly called “night soil”) transported to the countryside for use as fertilizer.
This waste disposal system worked, after a fashion. But it wasn’t perfect. Because the flow
of water down the streets or through the sewers to the Thames was irregular and could be
interrupted, industrial wastes sometimes built up and rotted in the midst of the city. Pig
styes were early banned from the streets because of their contribution to these disposal
problems and household cesspits were prohibited from connecting directly with the
sewers. Overflows, however, were not uncommon. By 1189, regulations required that
cesspits be located a minimum distance from property lines. Periodic complaints
nonetheless occurred, as when the Carmelite Friars in 1290 felt obliged to petition that the
“great stench” from the surrounding area made it impossible for them to carry out their
religious duties. The problems became serious enough that by the mid-14th Century,
successive Kings of England were moved to intervene. Edward III was particularly direct
when he addressed the officials of London in 1357:
Whereas now, when passing along the water of the Thames, we have beheld
dung and other filth accumulated in diverse places in the said City upon the
bank of the river aforesaid and also perceived the fumes and other abominable
stenches arriving therefrom… [we] do command you that you cause as well the
banks of the said river, as the streets and lanes of the same City, and the
suburbs thereof, to be cleaned of dung and other filth without delay and the
same when cleaned to be so kept. 13
The commands, however, do not seem to have been backed up by the knowledge of
how to accomplish the job, the resources to do it or the governance structures to
induce compliance. The stench would persist as an integral part of the London
experience for another five centuries.
London’s other great material need was for food. Some was supplied by the Thames
fisheries, but most was imported from farmers working a network extending 65–100km
into the surrounding hinterlands. Increasing demand was met there through a
combination of measures to increase yields on existing lands (e.g., through use of fertilizers,
improved seeds, better management), plus efforts to expand the amount of land under
cultivation. Together, these two supply responses managed to prevent serious hunger in
much of Europe, including England and London, through the first half of the 13th Century. 14
By the beginning of the 14th Century, however, agricultural expansion had been pushed to
the limit. Food shortages and malnutrition became increasingly chronic conditions.
Moreover, the massive forest clearing needed to increase the land available for agriculture
had also decreased the amount available for timber production. In the area surrounding
London, there was little forest land left except that reserved by the aristocracy for
recreation and game reserves. The resulting scarcity of accessible wood and other forest
products had a number of impacts on social life. These ranged from suffering among
6
peasants who could no longer use the forest as their traditional subsistence backup when
crops failed, to concern among royalty who could no longer find the timber needed for their
building projects. Perhaps more surprisingly, the growing scarcity of wood also brought on
what may have been the first of London’s many air pollution crises.
Since London’s founding, relatively clean-burning wood had been its primary source of fuel
for providing heat to homes and manufacturing (e.g., for smelting, metal working and the
production of lime for use in agriculture and building). But as forests made way for
agricultural fields, wood and the charcoal made from it became increasingly scarce, distant
and expensive. At the same time “sea coal”—a low-grade, soft, high-sulfur fossil fuel
initially sourced from coastal deposits—was becoming cheap and available. By the late
13th Century, wide-spread adoption of this new energy source in London was causing many
complaints about “infected and corrupted air.” In 1307 King Edward I intervened,
prohibiting the use of sea coals in lime kilns because of the “intolerable smell” that resulted
in “annoyance … and injury of their bodily health” for all in the vicinity. “Grievous
ransoms” were authorized to punish offenders. 15 Complaints about fumes did
subsequently decline, presumably reflecting improvement in air quality. In any case, air
pollution did not again figure prominently in the documentation of London’s affairs until
well into the 16th Century. It is tempting to attribute these apparent improvements in air
quality to the effectiveness of informed government action. But Edward’s royal decree
coincided with the end of the medieval boom period. The declining demand for coal almost
certainly helped to achieve the king’s goal.
Other problems, however, were on the rise. Despite the expansion of agricultural land that
had so dramatically reduced forest cover, in the early decades of the 14th Century
England—and indeed much of Europe—was struggling to feed itself. Food shortages,
malnutrition and even starvation became the norm. Population and economic growth
slowed.
Stagnation turned to collapse when the Black Death (almost certainly caused by the
bubonic plague) reached London in 1348 after rapidly spreading through Europe from
Asia. 16 Within 18 months, an astonishing half of London’s population was dead. The
plague returned sporadically throughout the remainder of the century, reducing England’s
population overall by perhaps 40%. (The plague would remain a significant cause of death
in London for the next three hundred years.) The impacts of the Black Death on social wellbeing in the 14th Century are incalculable. But just as the earlier increase in human
numbers and activity had reshaped wetland and forest landscapes into agricultural ones, so
the human depredations of the plague reversed that process. Untended embankments
collapsed, letting the Thames reclaim much of its former broad flood-plain (and in the
process reduce the vulnerability of up-stream London to storm-surges). 17 Forests invaded
the untended fields of London’s hinterlands, soon providing enough wood to meet the
much reduced demand of the much reduced London population. The use of sea coal—
widely seen as less desirable than wood—declined accordingly. Complaints about air
pollution declined with it. 18
7
Muddling through to the Great Fire of 1666: London of the Tudors & Stuarts
London did not recover its pre-plague population until the late 15th Century. But by 1520
the city was again booming and, toward the middle of the century, came to occupy a central
position in the growing world trade network. By the end of the reign of Elizabeth I in the
early 17th Century, London had become the preeminent population center of England, with
perhaps 220,000 inhabitants. Immigration rates were substantial, as more and more
people from England and abroad came to the city to take advantage of its economic,
political and cultural attractions. Technical innovations abounded, including a water wheel
that would pump water from the Thames to distribution points in the city for the next 240
years. The first private coaches also appeared, both speeding movement of people within
the existing city and increasing its effective scale. Governance innovations were also
advanced. A Bill of Sewers, meant to provide for systematic cleaning and drainage of the
city, was introduced in 1531. 19 Later efforts, reflecting awareness that the city was
outgrowing its ability to function, sought to limit both the expansion of London’s
boundaries and the subdivision of its existing housing stock into ever smaller, more
densely packed units. These efforts almost certainly had some impact. But they were
wholly inadequate to the rapidly growing challenges of a rapidly growing city.
For example, as booming London once again pressed its surrounding forests to supply land
for agriculture and timber for construction, wood again became too scarce or expensive for
use as a heating fuel. Sea coal again became the dominant fuel source, again leading to
complaints about foul emissions. This time, the king called on the newly emerging science
establishment to assess the causes and consequences of troubling smokes. Those scientists
got parts of the air pollution story about right by today’s standards, concluding that smoke
from coal burning industries caused material corrosion and damage to the lungs of city
dwellers. And they advanced logical proposals for mitigating damage: pre-combustion
treatment of coal to limit smoke emissions and movement of industries to the periphery of
London. But there was no acute crisis to focus attention and no mechanism in place for the
slow accumulation of knowledge to produce action. Science was ignored. London got
smokier. 20
The inadequacy of the system for solid waste disposal was also once again becoming
apparent. The king wrote to London’s mayor:
The king hath noticed that the ways in and about the City and liberties were
very noisome and troublesome for passing, in consequences of breaches of the
pavements and excessive quantities of filth lying in the streets. They require
him, by the king’s express command, to take effectual steps for the complete
repair of the pavements and the removal of all filth… 21
In short, the stinks of old were back. The king, as before, could command them to go away.
But, as before, he was ultimately disappointed with the result of his orders.
8
The combination of increasingly crowded living conditions, the build-up of human
excrement in back yards, alleys and water supplies, and the growing trade with the rest of
the world set the stage for an upsurge in infectious disease epidemics. 22 These included
not only the plague, which recurred at frequent intervals, but also an often undifferentiated
and increasingly deadly mix of influenza, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid,
diphtheria, measles, whooping cough and—above all—smallpox. As a result, it was not
uncommon for London to lose 10% or more of its total population to epidemic disease
outbreaks in any given decade. 23 Then, in 1665, the “Great Plague” struck with a violence
not seen since the first plague of the 14th Century. With vastly more people, rats and fleas
available in London to support the epidemic, the human toll was unprecedented: as many
as 100,000 Londoners may have died over the seven months of the outbreak, with more
than 7,000 per week perishing during its peak. Society at the time had no reliable
understanding of the plague’s causes, and therefore was left flailing about with a variety of
largely ineffectual measures to combat it. These ranged from mass killings of dogs and cats
(which presumably left the fleas that actually transmitted the disease looking for new
hosts) to packing up and fleeing the city (which hastened the spread of the disease), to a
breakdown of social networks as people refused to help sick servants, friends or family.
Samuel Pepys glumly noted in his diary “the plague [is] making us cruel as dogs to one
another.” 24
Whether London’s response to the Great Plague would have differed substantially from its
response to previous epidemics will never be known. For the Great Plague was followed in
the next year by the Great Fire: a conflagration fueled by the city’s tightly packed and
almost wholly wooden structures. London had experienced fires before. But that of 1666
was the worst, destroying a third of London and more than 80% of the core City where
finance and trade were concentrated. Surprisingly few people died. But perhaps a quarter
of the population that had survived the Great Plague of the year before was left homeless.
Many people spent the following winter camped in tents in fields surrounding the city.
Others fled the double devastation of plague and fire, never to return. London’s prospects
seemed bleak. An increasingly depressed Pepys wrote: “the City less and less likely to be
built again, every body settling elsewhere, and nobody encouraged to trade.” 25
A Waste of Life: London’s battle with disease in the 18th Century
London struggled through the remainder of the 17th and the first half of the 18th Centuries
with a slow, piecemeal reconstruction. Various grand plans for a new and orderly city
came to nothing. The London that rose from the ashes had much the street plan of the old
one. That London was, however, less flammable, as stone replaced wood as the preferred
building material. In the city center, financed by a new coal tax, thoroughfares were paved
and widened, drainage sewers were added, and several grand structures were built that
still stand today, including Guildhall and numerous churches by Christopher Wren
including St. Paul’s Cathedral. Reflecting on the result one giddy resident heralded London
as “not only the finest, but the most healthy city in the world.” 26
9
Beautiful it may have been, at least in the newly built center city if not the extensive
outlying slums. But healthy it was not. In fact, London experienced a general rise in
mortality throughout the 17th Century and had by the second quarter of the 18th Century
become an unprecedentedly unhealthy place. 27 More than a third of the babies born in the
city died in infancy. Overall life expectancy was a mere 18 years, barely half of what it was
then in England as a whole and less than a quarter of what it is today (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Life expectancy at birth in London and England (years) 28
90
80
70
60
50
London
40
England
30
20
10
0
17th C
(4th Q)
18th C
(2nd Q)
19th C
(1st Q)
1861-70
1901-1910
2010
One historian summarized the consequences as follows:
For most of the eighteenth century London is dominated by a sense of the ‘waste of
life’…. 29
The causes of London’s deteriorating health in the early 18th Century were unknown at the
time and remain difficult to disentangle today. It seems fairly certain, however, that no
major new diseases arrived in London during this period. Neither long term trends in
climate nor food shortages seem to have played a central role. More likely, the major
contributor to the decline of health in London during this period was the growing density
of people with little immunity to the many diseases that were endemic to the city. This
trend had two, and possibly three, interacting components:
• First was the extraordinary flow of young immigrants from the countryside.
Perhaps three quarters of Londoners at the time had been born somewhere else,
primarily in the rural areas of England, Scotland and Ireland. 30 Most of these
immigrants had experienced during their rural childhoods relatively few encounters
with the microbes they would meet in London, and thus had neither been selected
for, nor developed, immunity.
• Second was the dismal condition of London’s housing stock. The stagnant economy
had slowed new house construction to a trickle. As a result, existing buildings were
10
•
subject to decay and “internal colonization”: repeated subdivision into smaller and
smaller rooms packed with more and more people, rats and lice.
Third may well have been depressed rates of breast feeding. The extent of lowered
breast feeding in this period is unclear but seems to have been substantial. Causes
may have involved changes in demands of work, general illness, worsening nutrition
or social customs. The consequences, however, were stark. Breast feeding provided
infants who received it with food that was nutritious, free from contamination and
laden with antibodies and other antimicrobial substances passed on from the
mother. Children lacking these benefits due to limited or no breast feeding may
have been 5–10 times more likely to die as infants than those exclusively raised on
breast milk. 31
Together, these three components—a flow of immunologically naïve immigrants, increased
crowding in dilapidated housing, and a lack of breast feeding—created in London a perfect
environment for efficient transmission of the many diseases endemic in the city. The
“waste of life” that characterized the city in the 18th Century was the result.
But if London of the early 18th Century was a death trap, it was also the center of a
generally prosperous England’s central government, its greatest port, and its largest
manufacturing center. Though London had deep and persistent problems, it was also
growing a vibrant civic life. Coffee houses, newspapers and political debate proliferated.
Business prospered. And social reformers began to address what they saw as the problems
of the poor, providing workhouses to alleviate poverty, hospitals to support newborns and
treat the sick, and generally striving to make the city a better place to live.
One of the most effective social reforms focused on smallpox. In terms of cumulative
deaths, this was almost certainly London’s single most lethal disease of the time. A fairly
effective preventative treatment involving subcutaneous grafting of pustules or scabs from
an infected individual had been known for centuries in other parts of the world with a
longer history of smallpox. But how these “inoculation” or “variolation” treatments worked
was not understood. They were therefore rejected as without merit by the scholars of the
Royal Society and London’s medical profession. Eventual adoption in London owed less to
science than to the determined advocacy of Lady Mary Montague. As wife of England’s
ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Lady Montague had seen the effectiveness of variolation
on her journeys. When her testimony did not change minds of establishment science, she
had the treatment successfully applied to her own daughter in the presence of physicians of
the royal court. Faced with this evidence, and a high demand for protection from smallpox,
the medical establishment undertook in the early 1720s some systematic experimentation
(on prisoners and orphans). The generally positive results of these morally questionable
experiments finally led the experts to endorse the variolation procedure. The slow
adoption of variolation in both London and the hinterlands from which its immigrants
came helped, by 1760, to turn the tide against smallpox and to nudge along a slow decline
in deaths attributed to it. 32 Progress accelerated once true vaccination was added to the
arsenal of anti-smallpox measures through the pioneering efforts of Edward Jenner in the
early 19th Century. 33 The Royal Society rejected his initial paper on the subject, but he and
a growing number of others who had been persuaded by the evidence persisted.
11
By the middle of that century, the cumulative efforts of Montague, Jenner and other
pragmatists—with only a little help from scientific theory—had relegated smallpox to a
relatively minor role as a cause of death in London. 34 Coupled with the departure of the
plague (which had largely disappeared from London in the wake of the Great Fire), with the
better nutrition and housing that came with a recovering economy and with continuing
efforts of civic reformers and medical practitioners, the health of the city finally began to
improve. A Londoner born in the 1820s had twice the chance of surviving infancy, and
almost twice the life expectancy of one born a century earlier. 35 With its demographic
transition firmly underway, the city embarked on a century of rapid population growth.
This would take it from about one million inhabitants in 1800 to more than six million
people (supported by 300,000 horses) by 1900.
Water, Waste & Sewers up to the Great Stink of 1858: Victorian London
As a rapidly growing London took an increasingly dominant place on the world stage, the
city’s physical infrastructure and domestic governance arrangements lagged behind.
London’s chronic shortage of quality housing has already been noted and certainly
worsened over this period. But nowhere was the stress of rapid urban growth clearer than
in London’s losing battles with its enduring challenges of managing its water and solid
wastes. With the exception of the very wealthy, the million inhabitants of early 19th C.
London still relied for disposal of human excrement on essentially the same system of
cesspits, night-soil men, hand-pumps and open sewers that had been developed to serve a
medieval city of 1/40th the size. 36 For water supply, poorer districts continued to rely on
the shallow wells that had served the city for centuries. Now, however, the growing
demand for water was met by private companies intent on generating returns for their
investors. They did so by encouraging higher and higher water consumption. But they
could find no profit in handling the orderly disposal of the waters they provided, so sewage
systems remained undeveloped.
The farms that once received most of the contents of the cesspits as manure were
increasingly far removed from the city, making disposal of wastes there more costly and
less likely to occur. (That recycling system would collapse almost entirely after 1847 when
an expanding world trade system began to capitalize on Alexander von Humboldt’s earlier
discovery that huge Peruvian deposits of bird droppings, or guano, could be used as very
effective agricultural fertilizer. Mined by indentured Chinese labor and shipped to England,
guano killed the demand for London’s night soil by farmers in its hinterland.) 37 With no
one motivated to remove its increasing quantity of wastes, London’s disposal system was
overwhelmed. Its cesspits overflowed into the other water management channels,
comingling wastes with surface drainage water in the sewers, mixing it with many of the
city’s water sources and emitting an ever more pervasive stench.
Several responses to this deteriorating situation were possible. Unfortunately the
responses initially adopted were guided by the prevailing science of the day, which was
wrong. Confusing correlation with causation, scientists argued that disease was associated
12
with air born “miasmas” arising from rotting fecal material and other wastes. This theory
led to, or reinforced, a practical engineering emphasis on protecting people from tangible
stenches rather than protecting water supplies from intangible contamination. In
particular, it encouraged widespread adoption in the early 19th Century of the new “water
closet” technology that swept foul smelling human household waste away to “somewhere
else.” It supported the lifting (in 1803) of the long standing prohibition on connecting
household drains directly to drainage sewers and thence to the “somewhere else” that was
the Thames. It was eventually used to justify the requirement (in 1848) that such
connections be made for all households in order to reduce dangerous back alley odors. The
resulting success in flushing London’s stenches away from houses meant that the Thames
rapidly became a common cesspool for all of London, essentially replacing many of the
thousands of backyard cesspools that had previously held the city’s wastes. The miasma
science of the day provided no reason to worry over the fact that this new Thames cesspool
had somehow lost all of its once plentiful fish life and still served as the source of much of
the city’s drinking water.
Better knowledge, based on the germ theory of disease, would eventually show why
dumping fecal matter into one’s water supply had not just unaesthetic consequences but
also unhealthy ones. But general acceptance of this healthier perspective on how to
organize human activities would need to await the discoveries of Pasteur, Koch and their
colleagues beginning in the 1860s. In the meantime, pressures to clean London of its
centuries-old stenches persisted, driven by concerns over the continued presence of many
old diseases in London and the arrival in England in 1831 of a deadly new one from Asia:
cholera. Cholera was a terrifying disease, even for a city accustomed to epidemics. It
would kill by dinner people who had seemed healthy at breakfast and struck down rich and
poor alike. London’s first epidemic surged through the city in 1832, killing more than
6000. Medical science was initially unable to offer alternatives to miasmic accounts of the
disease’s origins or propagation. Remedial treatments thus explored all sorts of ad hoc and
ultimately ineffectual measures. And public health efforts continued to focus on separating
people from the stench, rather than people from their feces.
Fortunately, some measures undertaken to improve the smell and other aesthetic qualities
of London’s disgusting drinking water coincidentally also reduced the risk of water-borne
disease, including cholera. For example, some of the private water supply companies
competing for Londoners’ business developed sources from relatively sweet-smelling (but
also disease free) tributaries and springs. Others introduced the innovation of slow
percolation through sand for the purpose of removing waste from water before it could
stink. But this filtering process accidentally and unknowingly also removed most bacteria
before they could kill, which is why it remains widely used today. Such measures doubtless
contributed to the reduction of both stench and disease in the early 19th Century. But they
were not widely enough adopted to spare London from a return of cholera in 1848/9 and
1853/4, with each outbreak killing more than 10,000 people.
By the time of these mid-century outbreaks, however, what today we would recognize as
the modern science of statistical inference had begun to take form. Drawing from the
extensive records of the location and causes of deaths kept by the city, scientists were able
13
to make empirical headway on the disease front, even under the burden of incorrect
miasma theories regarding those diseases’ origins and propagation. Most famously, the
physician John Snow concluded from data he mobilized on deaths occurring during the
1848/1849 cholera outbreak that the disease was more likely to result from an ingestion of
a particle than from inhalation of miasmic air. Snow’s statistical arguments did not
immediately carry the day in scientific circles. But along with politically forceful arguments
from the royal palace that the Thames water stank and tasted terrible, plus the persistent
public fear of another cholera epidemic, his findings almost certainly helped gain passage
of the Metropolis Water Act of 1852. The Act required that by 1855 all of London’s
drinking water taken from the Thames would have to be sourced from above the limits of
its tidal reach (and so upstream of the city’s pollution), and would have to be passed
through the slow sand filters that up to then were only in patchy use.
The Act was too little, too late to spare London another cholera epidemic in 1853/4. But
intense study of the mortality patterns exhibited in that epidemic by Snow and the
scientists on London’s Board of Health finally showed beyond reasonable scientific doubt
that people who drank putrefied water during cholera outbreaks were much more likely to
die than those who drank relatively pure water, even when they lived in common
neighborhoods exposed to the same “miasmas” of air and other environmental conditions.
In a scientifically admirable if practically exasperating show that they correctly understood
the limits of epidemiological statistics, however, the scientists of the Health Board were
careful to stress that they had not shown that bad water caused cholera and had no theory
that would explain such causation.
They did, however, have compelling evidence of the greatest practical significance:
substituting clean water for filthy water radically reduced the chances of contracting
cholera and other diseases. They also presciently pointed out that while implementing the
Water Act’s requirement to use only the upper Thames as a source might help limit the
immediate risk of cholera, it “remains but imperfect and precarious while … (up-stream)
populations exercise a right of sewerage into the drinking water of London.” 38 Private
water suppliers exploited the scientists’ caution to press their claim that Thames water,
though “nourishing a population of animalcules, would not be noxious to health.” 39
Politicians dithered about the administrative and financial hurdles involved in establishing
clean water supplies. John Snow famously demonstrated that removing the handle of the
contaminated Broadstreet Pump could arrest the local spread of the 1853/4 cholera
epidemic. But once that epidemic had passed little action followed from what we now
know were the broadly correct and potentially useful scientific findings of the Health
Board.
Action, when it did come, was precipitated not by scientific arguments but by cataclysmic
events. In this case, a particularly hot June in 1858 transformed London’s communal
cesspool—the River Thames—from its chronic state of mere foulness into what would
become notorious as the “Great Stink.” A contemporary wrote,
14
Such was the overpowering smell from the Thames, that the curtains of the Commons
were soaked in chloride of lime in a vain attempt to protect the sensitivities [of the rich
and powerful]. 40
The future prime minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli, was seen fleeing the Chamber,
decrying the “Stygian pool” that was sloshing back and forth with the tides through the
middle of what was supposed to be the greatest city on earth. When cooler weather
allowed it to reconvene, Parliament acted with unprecedented speed. By summer’s end it
had authorized a massive and innovative program of sewer construction. Within seven
years this huge infrastructure project would capture much of the household sewage of
London and divert it to discharges downstream of the city. The reasons cited in the
Parliamentary debates reflected not merely the unaesthetic qualities of the stink (which
they had lived with, at one intensity or another, for all of their lives), but also what was now
a mix of beliefs that by eliminating the “miasma” of foul air, or the putrid water, or both,
they might also reduce the incidence of cholera and other diseases that threatened to kill
them.
Subsequent events seemed to justify their hopes. Cholera returned to London for what
proved to be the last time in 1866. But it claimed only half the victims of previous
outbreaks, with deaths concentrated in the parts of the city not yet fully served by the new
sewer system. Mortality in London from typhoid fever and diarrhea declined as well, even
as cities without sewer systems experienced recurrent epidemics. Victorian England,
already smug for many reasons, celebrated its new sewer system as “the most extensive
and wonderful work of modern times.” 41
A major and daring accomplishment it was and one that most certainly improved the
quality of life in London. Much of its basic structure remains in place today. The
engineering marvel that was London’s sewers did not, however, solve the problem of water
and waste disposal, but just pushed them away: downstream and into the future. (Later
measures would push them further still, first barging the wastes collected at sewer outfalls
to the ocean for dumping, today discharging it into the global atmosphere through
incineration.) London’s sewer innovations of the 1860s didn’t solve its disease problem,
either. (With a robust germ theory in hand we now know that the big assault on water
borne diseases was already—if not altogether consciously—well underway with the
passage of the 1852 Water Act and its provisions for clean water sourcing and filtering.) In
fact, the most important innovations surrounding the Great Stink and its resolution may
not have involved how to engineer health, but rather how to govern it.
Before the Stink, responsibility for the water supply and waste systems was distributed
among hundreds of local authorities, each with its own locally attuned rules and
technologies. This self-organized patchwork may have been adequate, even superior, when
London was smaller. But as the city grew, what had been local strength became a regional
weakness of turf fights and incompatible piping. Crucially, however, the various Acts
surrounding the Stink consolidated the local authorities under a new Metropolitan Board of
Works. The Board was given the authority and resources to impose solutions at scale that
previous measures had lacked. Above all, in the wake of the Great Stink a system was
15
developed that allowed the Board and various municipalities of the greater London region
to raise revenue for their water works through borrowing backed by property taxes and
water use levies. These governance innovations provided the foundation on which
subsequent public works measures to manage social-environmental interactions were built
over the coming decades. 42 Together with continuing advances in the science and
engineering of water supply and waste removal, they bequeathed modern London both
better human health and a better Thames environment than anyone in the 19th Century had
ever imagined, with productive fisheries, occasional swim races and rarely a stench to its
name.
Persistent Air Pollution & the Great Smog: London’s 20th Century 43
Preoccupied with their challenges involving water, cholera and fecal matter, Londoners of
the 19th and early 20th Centuries seem to have taken their lack of air quality for granted,
referring to their city not entirely unaffectionately as “The Smoke.” (This is sadly ironic, for
we know today that the health impacts of urban air pollution—particularly the particulate
matter that constituted the London smokes—are substantial.) Arthur Conan Doyle, for
example, seems to have been describing rather than criticizing London when he dispatched
Sherlock Holmes on chases through the “dense yellow fog” that he saw as characteristic of
the city in the late 19th Century. Those traveling to London from the country were less
sanguine. So were social critics such as Charles Dickens. His Esther of Bleak House, for
example, asked on her arrival in London several decades before Holmes roamed its streets
“whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown
smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.”
As noted earlier, fumes and smoke had always been part of London life (and death). The
complaints of the 13th Century were largely due to industrial use of coal, particularly in the
production of lime. As coal was increasingly adopted not only by industry but as a
domestic heating and cooking fuel in the late 16th Century, Londoners had thrown
themselves into the normal work of pollution control: making the bad stuff go somewhere
else. In this case, the “somewhere else” was the air of London, as indoor air pollution was
shifted outdoors through increasing use of low-rise household chimneys. 44 Complaints
began to build again, scientific studies were conducted, but not much changed. A century
later, the invention of the steam engine resulted in a rapid increase in coal use throughout
the city. Some regulations to limit emissions were put in place, but these were largely
focused on a relatively few industrial installations. The idea that Londoners themselves,
devoted as they were to their individual hearths and chimneys, were a big part of the
overall air pollution problem got little traction at all. As a result, the same combination of a
surge of London’s population and an industrial revolution that had overwhelmed the city’s
ability to provide acceptably healthy water to its people in the 19th Century overtook its
ability to provide acceptably healthy air in the 20th.
A series of increasingly severe “pea soup” fogs in the first decades of the 20th Century
brought about increasing concerns for the impact of deteriorating air quality on the city, its
16
commerce and its inhabitants’ health. The Second World War, however, turned peoples’
attentions to more immediate concerns. The War affected London in multiple ways, as it
did England and the world. Most immediate for the city, however, was the Blitz: the
strategic bombing of the city by Germany in 1940. At least 20,000 Londoners were killed, a
second “great fire” ravaged the city, and more than 300,000 of its houses together with
much of its industrial base were destroyed. Many people fled the city, and the population
continued to fall over the next half century.
But London once again showed itself able to recover and rebuild in the wake of disaster,
once again drawing on people and other resources from a nation and foreign friends for
which London had become simply indispensable. This rebuilding began to grapple
seriously with housing and green space issues, and once again air pollution returned as a
subject of discussion. Then, in December 1952, London experienced a week-long “killer
smog” that was as (or more) severe than anything in today’s headlines about rapidly
growing cities of the developing world. Contemporary accounts refer to
the worst fog that I’d ever encountered. It had a … strong, strong smell … of sulfur…
Even in daylight, it was a ghastly yellow color… You literally could not see your hand in
front of your face. 45
Transportation stopped. A performance of La Traviata was cancelled because of poor
visibility inside the opera hall. The black smoke permeated everything, from the stacks of
the British Library to the underwear of householders. 46 This single pollution episode came
to be known as “the Great Smog” and may have killed as many as 12,000 Londoners 47—
more than half the number killed by the entire wartime bombing blitz and comparable in
numbers (though not proportions) to the toll of individual plague and cholera outbreaks of
earlier times.
Unfortunately, the magnitude of the death toll was not fully appreciated for another 50
years when careful scholarship finally disentangled how this acute episode of air pollution
increased the death rates from chronic respiratory conditions. Action therefore did not
follow the Great Smog of 1952 as quickly or forcefully as it had the Great Stink of 1858. But
in the wake of the Smog, air pollution would never again be accepted as an inevitable
condition of living in London, and regulations to reduce it finally were accorded broad
public support. Parliament eventually passed a Clean Air Act in 1956. This included for the
first time efforts to control domestic as well as industrial production of smoke. It
established “smokeless” zones, thus inducing fuel switches away from the dirtiest coals and
effectively reducing particulate emissions. It did not address directly sulfur or other
emissions, though some of these declined as well as a result of the smoke-driven fuel
switches. Systematic progress on dealing with these other pollutants did not occur until
the last decades of the 20th Century. Some of that progress was simply due to the
continuing clearance and replacement of London’s old housing and to the export of much of
its manufacturing industry to other parts of the world. But efforts to improve London’s air
quality, like similar efforts elsewhere, benefited greatly from novel synergies that began to
take shape in the 1980s between programs of transnational environmental research and
programs of transnational environmental governance. For the first time, those programs
17
systematically brought science to bear on the shortcomings of development strategies that
dealt with wastes by pushing them elsewhere. Work on acid rain (involving many of the
same pollutants as a The Great Smog) led the way, followed quickly by international
programs integrating monitoring, research and governance to address the challenges of
stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change and a still expanding array of other
pollutants. 48 These global scientific programs combined with regional initiatives by the
European Union began to pull Britain toward more aggressive policies of environmental
protection. They simultaneously provided leverage for local London reformers who
succeeded in pushing forward home grown innovations such as the inner city congestion
charge on automobile traffic.
Whether such coalitions of global science and local action in the environmental sphere can
be expanded, or learned from, to provide comparable support for understanding and
addressing the social dimensions of sustainability remains to be seen. What is clear is that
today’s urban centers are the crucibles in which some of the most integrated pursuits of
sustainability are taking place. One of the most inventive such crucibles is, as it has been
for centuries, the City of London.
Sustainable development questions arising from the London case
1. It has been said that cities in search of a sustainable future have always faced two
central challenges: i) assuring a supply of materials and energy essential to their
functioning while disposing effectively of the resulting wastes, and ii) developing a
capacity to cope with shocks and stress. How does the history of London reflect on
these challenges, and the ways of meeting them?
2. London’s population has grown almost a thousand fold over the last millennium. Much
of that growth has come in spurts -- one centered on about 1200, one on about 1600
and the most recent on about 1850 – followed by periods of much slower growth or
even decline (see Fig. 1). What does this pattern suggest about the role played by
population growth in sustainable development?
3. London and other cities for much of their histories created environments that degraded
human health, and thus human well-being, far more than did the environments of the
surrounding countryside. And yet people kept immigrating to the London death trap.
Why? What are the implications for thinking about sustainable development in a
globally mobile world?
4. London suffered major setbacks several times over the last millennium, whether by
“Great Plagues,” “Great Fires,” “Great Stinks,” “Great Wars” or “Great Smokes.” What
should good assessments of the “sustainable development” of London have concluded
about London’s long term prospects just before, and just after, each of these destructive
events?
18
5. Which of the assets that form the “productive base” of a society were in fact damaged or
degraded in each of the destructive episodes noted above? Which were conserved or
enhanced? What does this suggest about the way that multiple assets ought to be
handled in contemporary assessments of sustainability?
6. What does the history of London suggest about contemporary efforts to frame the
challenge of sustainable development in terms of “a transition toward sustainability”?
7. Where in London’s history are the greatest missed opportunities to set the city on a
trajectory to more sustainable development? Where are the greatest seized
opportunities? What do these answers suggest about general strategies to promote
sustainability?
8. Technological innovation and scientific discovery played substantial roles in shaping
the coevolution of society and environment in London. But technological solutions to
one problem often became the technological causes of another problem. And science
was often wrong, suggesting responses to sustainability concerns that proved to be
ineffectual or counterproductive. How does the London experience suggest that we
should treat science and technology in the design of future assessments and strategies
to promote sustainability?
9. With all its continuing problems of housing, air quality, and social cohesion, London
today is healthier and richer than it has ever been. More so than most places in the
world, you can drink its water, breath its air, eat its food, imbibe its culture, and use it to
shape a better world for yourself and your children. At least if you are rich enough.
Given the multiple catastrophes and failures that have befallen London in the past, what
should its present condition, and how it got there, teach us about the prospects for
pursuing sustainability in London and the rest of the world?
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Retrieved August 9, 2014, from http://www.unfpa.org/pds/urbanization.htm.
Wohl, A. S. (1983). Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain. London: J. M. Dent.
Woods, R. (2000). The Demography of Victorian England and Wales. Cambridge / New York:
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Endnotes
1
Liu, J., Mooney, H., Hull, V., Davis, S. J., Gaskell, J., Hertel, T., et al. 2015. Systems integration
for global sustainability. Science 347(6225). [doi:10.1126/science.1258832]; Levin, Simon,
Xepapadeas, Tasos, Crepin, Anne-Sophie, et al. 2013. Social-ecological systems as complex
adaptive systems: Modeling and policy implications. Environment and Development
Economics. 18:111–132.
2
The scarcity of accessible empirical accounts of long term dynamics of socialenvironmental systems was one conclusion of a workshop on the future of sustainability
science recently hosted by the US National Science Foundation (Levin, S. A., & Clark, W. C.
2010. Toward a Science of Sustainability: Report from a Conference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Environmental Institute. http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/9774654). That said, the field
of environmental history provides a growing number of potentially relevant cases (e.g.,
McNeill, J. R. 2010. The state of the field of environmental history. Annual Review of
Environment & Resources 35:345–374), as does geography (e.g., Butzer, K. W., & Endfield, G.
H. 2012. Critical perspectives on historical collapse. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 109: 3628–3631; Turner, B. L., & Sabloff, J. A. 2012. Classic period collapse of the
central Maya lowlands: Insights about human–environment relationships for
22
sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109: 13908–13914) and
anthropology (e.g., Lansing, J. S. 2006. Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). In addition, systematic long term studies of
ongoing social-environmental systems at particular sites have been launched as part of the
LTER network and are producing provocative results (e.g., The Baltimore Ecosystem Study,
http://www.beslter.org/ and the Central Arizona–Phoenix Study, http://caplter.asu.edu/).
3 Florida, R. L., Mellander, C., & Gulden, T. (2012). Global metropolis: Assessing economic
activity in urban centers based on nighttime satellite images. Professional Geographer 64
(2): 178–187.
4 UN Population Division (2012). World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision:
Highlights. ESA/WP/224. New York: UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
Population Division.
5 UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund). (2007). Urbanization: A majority in cities.
Retrieved August 9, 2014, from http://www.unfpa.org/pds/urbanization.htm.
6 Moon, B. K. (2012). Our struggle for global sustainability will be won or lost in cities (Speech
to High-level delegation of mayors and regional authorities), April 23, 2012 (Press release
No. SG/SM/14249 ENV/DEV/1276 HAB/217). New York: United Nations. Moon’s phrasing
here links back to that of Maurice Strong, secretary general of the first UN Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro, who said words to the effect of “if our planet is to remain a hospitable and
sustainable home for the human species, the battle would be won or lost in major urban
areas.”
7 IESE Center for Globalization and Strategy. (2014). Cities in Motion Index 2014. University
of Navarra, Spain: IESE Business School; PwC. (2014). Cities of opportunity 6. Delaware,
USA: PricewaterhouseCoopers; Economist Intelligence Unit. (2012). The Green City Index.
Munich, Germany: Siemens.
8 Greater London Authority. (2011). The London Plan: Spatial development strategy for
greater London July 2011. Context and Strategy (ch. 1, para. 1.52). London: Greater London
Authority.
9 Brimblecombe, P., (1987). The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since
Medieval Times. London, New York: Methuen, p. 68. The author also notes that London’s
situation had none of the inversion-prone basin attributes that would eventually so plague
the air pollution control efforts of other cities, e.g., Los Angeles.
10Glacken, C. J. (1967). Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought
from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, p. 336.
11 This section draws extensively on the following accounts:
For water, Halliday, S. (1999). The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and
the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital. Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton; and Green, C.
H. (2010). Case study brief – Sustainable urban water management in London. (Input to
deliverable 6.1.5-6 Comparative Analysis of Enabling Factors for Sustainable Urban Water
Management) Switch Project.
For forest, coal, and air quality connections, Tebrake, W. H. (1975). Air-pollution and
fuel crises in preindustrial London, 1250–1650. Technology and Culture 16 (3): 337–359.
12 Sources: 1801–present is from GB Historical GIS / University of Portsmouth, London
GovOf through time | Population Statistics | A vision of Britain through time: Total
23
population. http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10097836/cube/TOT_POP); 1700–
1800 is from Landers, J., (1993). Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic
History of London, 1670–1830. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press; Data
for earlier period are from Derek Keene. (2000). London from the post-Roman period to
1300. In D. M. Palliser (Ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (pp. 187–216).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Keene, D. (2012). Medieval London and its supply
hinterlands. Regional Environmental Change 12 (2): 263–281.
13 Halliday, S. (1999). Op. cit., pg.44, quoting HT Riley, ed. Memorials of London Life, pg. 295.
Metropolitan Archives.
14 Tebrake, W. H. (1975). Op. cit., citing Duby, G. (1971). Medieval agriculture 900–1500. In
C. M. Cipolla (Ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe. London: Collins. p. 199.
15 Tebrake, W. H. (1975). Op. cit., citing Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I (1302–7), p. 537.
16 Information on the plague in London is from: Museum of London. (2011). London plagues
1348–1665. Retrieved Aug. 9, 2014, from http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/exploreonline/pocket-histories/london-plagues-13481665/black-death-13481350/.
17 Galloway, J. A., & Potts, J. S. (2007). Marine flooding in the Thames Estuary and tidal river
c.1250–1450: impact and response. Area 39 (3): 370–379.
18 Tebrake, W. H. (1975). Op. cit., citing Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I (1302–7), p. 537.
19 23 Henry VIII Cap. V.; Jenner has shown that refuse disposal in 16th and 17th Century
London was generally well organized with officials requiring streets swept 2x per day, at
least in central London (Jenner, M. S. R., Early Modern English Conceptions of ‘Cleanliness’
and ‘Dirt’ as Reflected in the Environmental Regulation of London, c. 1530–c. 1700 [Ph.D.
diss., Oxford University, 1991], especially chapter 2.)
20 Brimblecombe, P. (1987). Op. cit., pp. 67ff, citing the work of 17th C. scientists Margaret
Cavendish, Kenelm Digby, and John Evelyn.
21 Halliday, S. (1999). Op. cit., pg. 47 quoting Analytical Index to the Rememgrencia, 1579–
1664 (Corporation of London, 1878), p. 482. Guildhall Library.
22 Malnutrition was endemic in London, especially for the poor. (Hard data are not available
until later periods. But poor children born in London in the mid-18th Century would grow
up to be a full 10” shorter than their contemporaries in rural England or than children born
in London two centuries later. That said, there is little convincing evidence that changes in
nutritional status were associated with major disease outbreaks. See: Landers, J. (1993).
Op. cit. Pp.66–68.
23 Twigg, G. (1993). Plague in London: spatial and temporal aspects of mortality. In J. A. I.
Champion (Ed.), Epidemic Disease in London (Center for Metropolitan History Working Paper
Series No. 1) (pp. 1–17). London: Center for Metropolitan History. Retrieved from
http://events.sas.ac.uk/support-research/publications/923.
24 Information on the Great Plague, including the quote from Pepys, is from:
Museum of London. (2011). Op. cit.
25 The account of the Great Fire and its consequences is from: Museum of London. (2005).
London’s burning: The Great Fire of London 1666. Retrieved Aug. 9, 2014, from
http://archive.museumoflondon.org.uk/Londons-Burning/.
26 Ibid.
27 Finlay, R. (1981). Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580–1650.
Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
24
Pre-1850 London data are from: Landers, J., (1993). Op. cit., Fig. 5.3 and Table 4.10.
Contemporary London data are from Public Health England database
(http://www.lho.org.uk/), esp. Baker, A., Findlay, G., Murage, P., Pettitt, G., Leeser, R.,
Goldblatt, P., et al. (2011). Fair London, Healthy Londoners. London Health Commission; and
Greater London Authority Demography Team. (2010). Infant mortality: 2002–2008 Update
09-2010). London: Greater London Authority. Pre-1850 England data are from Wrigley, E.
A., & Schofield, R. (1989). The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A
Reconstruction. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press (Tables 7.15 [life
expectancy at birth, by quartiles] and 7.19 [infant mortality, by half century]). Data for
London and England 1850–1910 are from Woods, R. (2000). The Demography of Victorian
England and Wales. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press.
29 George, M. D. (1965). London Life in the Eighteenth Century. New York, Harper & Row
1965, pp. 35–6.
30 Landers, J. (1993). Op. cit. p. 47.
31 A thorough case for the role of breast feeding in the high mortality rates of 18th C. London
is made in: Landers, J., (1993). Op. cit. p. 47. Further insights into the data behind this case
are given by: Fildes, V. A. (1995). The culture and biology of breastfeeding: An historical
review of Western Europe. In P. Stuart-Macadam & K. A. Dettwyler (Eds.), Breastfeeding:
Biocultural Perspectives (pp. 101–126). New York: Walter de Gruyter, Inc.; King, S. (1997).
Dying with style: Infant death and its context in a rural industrial township 1650–1830.
Social History of Medicine 10(1): 3–24; and Knodel, J., & Kinter, H. (1977). Impact of breast
feeding patterns on biometric analysis of infant-mortality. Demography 14 (4): 391–409.
The assertion that breast feeding can increase infant survival chances 5–10 fold is from a
study by Huck (1997; Table 4) of the generally more sanitary and less disease infested
London of 1908–1918, and thus almost certainly represents a lower limit (Huck, P. (1997).
Shifts in the seasonality of infant deaths in nine English towns during the 19th century: A
case for reduced breast feeding? Explorations in Economic History 34 (3): 368–386). An
accessible summary of the benefits of breastfeeding is provided by: Jackson, K. M., & Nazar,
A. M. (2006). Breastfeeding, the immune response, and long-term health. JAOA: Journal of
the American Osteopathic Association 106 (4): 203–207.
32 The progress is most evident in the wealthy, who adopted variolation early. For England
as a whole, until the middle of the 18th Century life expectancy of ducal families was
indistinguishable from that of commoners, averaging 30–35 years. After that, being rich
began to matter: by 1866/71, a child born into a ducal family could expect to live 60 years,
half again as long as the average Englander. See: Harris, B. (2004). Public health, nutrition,
and the decline of mortality: The McKeown thesis revisited. Social History of Medicine 17
(3): 379–407.
33 The term “vaccination” was introduced by scientist Edward Jenner to describe his
demonstration in 1796 that by exposing a person to cowpox—a relatively mild disease
commonly experienced by milkmaids—he could protect them from subsequent infections
by smallpox. Jenner’s paper reporting the evidence for his new approach was rejected by
the Royal Society. He nevertheless persisted, privately published a report on his findings,
and distributed the vaccine freely to all who were willing to try it for themselves or to treat
others. Despite much controversy—part of it arising from campaigns in support of the now
well-established but less effective variolation procedure—he and his followers achieved
28
25
results. By the early 19th Century widespread acceptance of vaccination brought about
rapid declines in smallpox deaths.
34 Principal sources for this smallpox story are Razzell, P. E. (2003). The Conquest of
Smallpox: The Impact of Inoculation on Smallpox Mortality in Eighteenth Century Britain
(2nd ed.). Firle: Caliban Books; and Riedel, S. (2005). Edward Jenner and the history of
smallpox and vaccination. Proceedings Baylor University Medical Center 18 (1): 21–25.
Useful additional perspectives drawing on newer data are provided in: Davenport, R.,
Schwarz, L., & Boulton, J. (2011). The decline of adult smallpox in eighteenth-century
London. Economic History Review 64 (4): 1289–1314; and: Razzell, P. E. (2011). The decline
of adult smallpox in eighteenth-century London: a commentary. Economic History Review
64 (4): 1315–1335.
35 Landers, J., (1993). Op. cit.
36 This section draws heavily on Green, C. H. (2010). Op. cit. and Halliday, S. (1999). Op. cit.
37 Halliday, S. (1999). Op. cit., pp. 52ff.
38 Simon, J. (1856). Report of the Last Two Cholera-epidemics of London, as Affect by the
Consumption of Impure Water. London, England: General Board of Health, pg. 12.
39 Ibid., pg. 10.
40 Daunton, M. (2004). London’s “Great Stink” and Victorian urban planning. Retrieved 6/21,
2014, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/victorian_britain/social_conditions/
victorian_urban_planning_01.shtml.
41 Halliday, S. (1999). Op. cit., pg. 107.
42 The innovation arguments advanced here are drawn from Green, C. H. (2010). Op. cit.
43 Brimblecombe, P. (1987). Op. cit.
44 It is worth noting, in light of the present debates around indoor cook stoves in the
developing world, that according to Brimblecombe (1987, Op. cit., p. 55), one observer in
the early 17th Century wrote “that the number of chimneys had increased greatly since his
youth (mid-16th Century). In those times, he wrote, smoke indoors had been regarded as
“hardening the timbers of the house and as a disinfectant to ward off disease.”
45 BBC. (2002). Days of toxic darkness: Interview with Barbara Fewster. Retrieved Aug. 10,
2014, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2542315.stm.
46 BBC. (1952). London fog clears after days of chaos. Retrieved Aug. 10, 2014, from
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/9/newsid_4506000/45063
90.stm.
47 Bell, M. L., & Davis, D. L. (2001). Reassessment of the lethal London fog of 1952: Novel
indicators of acute and chronic consequences of acute exposure to air pollution.
Environmental Health Perspectives Supplements 109:389–394.
48 Social Learning Group. (2001). Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks. Vol. 1, A
Comparative History of Social Responses to Climate Change, Ozone Depletion, and Acid Rain.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
26